rather than the strength of armies and military victories, was the source of the British world-empire.
These impressions of mine coincided with the ideas I had formed in my student days, when I used to read the biographies of British statesmen. William Pitt, Castlereagh, Canning, Palmerston, Lord Salisbury, Gladstone—all these great figures appeared to me, a young student and a member of a small nation in Central Europe, who, from his youth upwards, had devoted careful thought to the destiny of his own nation and its struggle for existence, in an impressive and alluring light, by reason of the determined and yet humane manner in which they pursued their aims.
By a strange freak of destiny and under circumstances altogether curious and unexpected, I suddenly found myself now face to face with the successors of those historical figures, successors concerning whom history—whatever judgment it may pass on them—will one day declare that in the greatest war that the world had hitherto experienced they helped to control the destinies of the British world-empire, and they had a share in deciding the fate of half the globe. I could not help recalling my early impressions, which had left such vivid traces on my mind and in the light of which I still regarded British policy.
It was with these sentiments that I carried on negotiations during the war, during the Peace Conference, and also later with Mr. Balfour, Lord Robert Cecil, Lord Curzon, and others. I regarded them as prominent figures in the Great War. Lord Balfour, whose mild stoical scepticism, rarely showing itself, but nevertheless acting strongly within him, I observed whenever I began to speak to him about political matters, was always thoroughly familiar with the topics forming the subject of his negotiations. Outwardly he produced the impression that, like other Englishmen, he was slow in taking in the points that had been explained, but he grasped the essentials of questions with exceptional rapidity, with equal rapidity he discovered his opponent’s weaknesses, and in the course of debate he managed to direct the argument straight towards them. He had a brilliant capacity for finding his way about when dealing with a problem, and particularly for forming a rapid and final judgment about persons. He will certainly occupy a permanent place among the great English statesmen. I had opportunities, especially later on at the Peace Conference, of seeing with what
